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Who Is This Hornswoggler?

Andrew Wheeler has had a varied career in publishing and related fields. He spent 16 years as a bookclub editor (mostly for the Science Fiction Book Club), and then moved into marketing. He marketed books and related products to accountants for Wiley for eight years, and now works for Thomson Reuters on large online legal products. He was a judge for the 2005 World Fantasy Awards and the 2008 Eisner Awards. He also reviewed a book a day for a year twice. He lives with The Wife and two mostly tame sons (Thing One, born 1998; and Thing Two, born 2000) at an unspecified location in suburban New Jersey. He has been known to drive a minivan, and nearly all of his writings are best read in a tone of bemused sarcasm. Antick Musings’s manifesto is here. All opinions expressed here are entirely and purely those of Andrew Wheeler, and no one else.

Tuesday, July 19, 2011

It is, of course, a cheat to review a book one hasn't read, or hasn't finished. So then this, by definition, is not a review. It's a notice, or a series of thoughts, or an admission of defeat. It's many things, potentially. In practice, it's likely to be a very short post on a book that I just wasn't in the right mood for.

Swamplandia! is Karen Russell's first novel; she'd previously published a book of stories, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, which I read and reviewed back in 2007. Swamplandia! is the story of a quirky family, running a slowly failing alligator-themed amusement park, somewhere off the Gulf coast of Florida, sometime in the last few decades. There's the gruff-but-loving father, the seemingly-perfect-because-she-just-died mother, and three adolescent children, each with their own problems.

That's not nearly enough people to run even a small amusement park -- it's barely enough people to run a single amusement -- and that was only the first of my problems with Swamplandia! This is a very literary novel, full of conceits that Russell carefully crafted to tell her quirky, oddball story. And I soon came to realize that, for whatever reason, I couldn't believe in any of them -- not the park Swamplandia! itself, not the fake-Indian background of the family, not the rotting library on a sinking boat, not the rival World of Darkness theme park, not even the narrative voice of precocious teenager Ava Bigtree. And, if you can't manage to suspend your disbelief for a book, that book is just not for you.

I'm disappointed; Swamplandia! has gotten excellent reviews, and it sounded like the kind of book I would like. It may be the kind of book you'd like, so don't take this is a dis-recommendation. But I've moved on, not without sadness, and I'm now in the middle of another book I can't believe a word of, which I'm afraid I will finish, for an external reason.